Devlog Update 94

We haven’t added a new transport ride in a looong time, but there’s a very iconic one used in many theme parks around the world that we didn’t have yet: the Monorail! Garret modeled it during this weeks Art Stream and here it is in the game:

It’s quite fast and especially great for providing transportation to the more remote areas of your park.

We added a ride synchronization feature. You can synchronize any station (i.e. flat rides or tracked ride stations) with any amount of other stations in the park, no matter where they are located.

(We also changed the previous “Waiting Time” setting to the more intuitive separate inputs for minimum/maximum waiting time)

These settings are also carried over into blueprints, so if you for example build a dueling coaster with two separate tracks and put them both into the same blueprint, the synchronization settings will already be properly set up when someone builds that blueprint. 

You can even synchronize tracked ride stations with other stations on the same track. I imagine this might be most useful for dark rides to better control in which parts of the track the trains are, but I’m sure you’ll find some other interesting uses for it :)

Starting with the next release we’ll change the savegame format to a new compressed one (.park) that reduces savegame size by up to ~85%. The biggest savegame I’ve seen was around 10MB and there’s plenty of disk space nowadays so savegame size was never really an issue, but with content sharing over the internet and cloud storage (and bigger parks in the future) it’s still nice to reduce this.
Don’t worry though: all your old .txt savegames will still be supported, and for those of you who like to manually edit their savegame files this only means that you have to decompress the .park file into a .txt once if you start a new park, which can be done easily with a tool like 7-Zip (or modders could easily create an own tool for it within a few minutes).